


Lily Evans and the Murders at Midnight

by socolormecurious



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Birthday Parties, Character Death, Cliffhangers, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Marauders' Era, Murder Mystery, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Graphic Violence, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pseudo-noir, Secret Relationships, Slow Burn, at some point this became more similar to veronica mars than i intended, calling Snape out as the racist that he is, not a jily fic but rather a fic with jily in it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 06:57:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14785652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/socolormecurious/pseuds/socolormecurious
Summary: As Lily Evans enters her seventh year at Hogwarts, she must confront her idealistic views of the Wizarding World.Part character study, part noir and revenge, part Jily.





	Lily Evans and the Murders at Midnight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes a sibling rivalry, three hundred words of Chekhov's Wards that you could probably honestly skip, and teenage gossip.
> 
> Official songs of the chapter: "The Walker" by Fitz and the Tantrums and "Most Girls" by Hailee Steinfeld

Lily woke to the sound of her dearly beloved sister pounding on her bedroom door. “Lily! One of your freak friends is on the phone--”

Lily bolted up and rummaged around for a sweater. “Mum!” She slipped the sweater over her head and grabbed a tie for her hair. She glanced at the clock. It was a perfectly reasonable hour--8:00 am--and yet Lily felt exhausted. Despite going to bed at nine the night before, dreams of bonfires and masked figures and hospital beds had haunted her.

“Don’t call your sister’s friends freaks, Tuney dear,” their mother called from the kitchen, presumably where she was cooking breakfast.

Petunia carried on as if she had not heard their mother. Her tone was so petulant that Lily would not have been surprised if Petunia stomped her foot like a two year old. “And you had better be quick about it because I’m waiting for a call from Vernon--”

“Oh, no, we mustn’t keep Vernon waiting.” Lily said as she opened the door and ducked under her sister’s arm to reach for the phone. 

Luckily, the sarcasm had distracted Petunia, and Lily was able to snatch the phone. “Mum!”

“Lily, stop making fun of your sister’s fiance.” Mrs. Evans was almost able to keep the long years of suffering out of her voice. Almost.

“Yes, Mum,” Lily said without a hint of remorse and she cradled the phone to her ear. “Mary,” she breathed, winding the cord around her wrist and then heading to the bathroom. Once she was firmly inside, she shut the door so that she wouldn’t be overheard.

“Lily! Did you get your letter yet?” Mary’s soft Scottish brogue filled the speaker and Lily felt herself smiling. She hadn’t seen her best friend in nearly a month.

“No,” Lily said, as she put the lid down and sat on the toilet. “Wait, did you?”

“Huh. Well, I do live closer to the castle.” 

Lily groaned. “Now I’m going to spend the entire morning trying to come up with a spell to track the skies for the movement of one measly little owl.”

“Oh come on, it can’t be that long. I’ll stay on the line with you until it comes.”

“Oh, but Petunia is expecting a call from  _ Vernon _ .” Lily’s voice went up to approximate her sister’s tone on the last word, and hey both giggled. Lily may or may not have recapped entire dinners with the Dursley in her letters to her friend, just like she may or may not have drawn (poorly) some sketches of her soon-to-be brother-in-law to accompany them. “She woke me up like a right beast this morning. Well, technically, she woke me up for you, but I couldn’t stay mad at you even if I tried, so I will have to blame it all on her.”

“The family getting to you that badly?” 

“Let’s just say, I’m counting down the days until the first.”

“Where are you now?”

“Hiding in the bathroom--my bedroom isn’t as soundproof. You know,” Lily said, rummaging through the cabinet, “I might as well paint my nails while I’m in here.” She picked up a red bottle and chatted with Mary about what Mary had had for breakfast.

Lily was finishing her left hand when there was a tapping at the window. Lily squealed, dropping both the nail polish and the phone in the process. There was a rapidly spreading stain of bright red that she made a mental note to clean up with a spell as soon as she just opened this one letter…

Almost immediately as soon as she touched the envelope, Lily knew. Just the weight of it tipped her off. She slipped a finger under the seal and pulled the badge out. Head Girl. She was going to be Head Girl. Oh, but she couldn’t wait to rub it in the face of every stuck up pureblood bitch who smirked to her face and called her a Mudblood behind her back.

“LILY!” Mary screeched, and Lily fumbled to pick up the phone again.

“Sorry!” She fumbled to pick the phone back up and right the nail polish.

“I take it you got it.”

Lily nodded, and realized she should probably say it aloud, too. “You’re on the phone with the Head Girl of the Class of 1978.”

“Scandalous. Let me take you out for lunch. We’ll go school shopping, too.”

“Alright, but only if I’m paying for ice cream.”

“Sure thing.”

A loud banging startled her, and she wondered how long she had been talking. “Look, I’ve got to get off the phone, but let’s say Flourish and Blotts  at 11:00?”

“You got yourself a date, Evans.” She could hear the wink in Mary’s voice.

“See you then, Macdonald.”

The line clicked, and Lily opened the door to hang up the phone. Petunia took one look at her sister, the mess on the bathroom rug, and the owl still sitting on the window ledge, snatched the phone out of Lily’s hand, and stomped back down the stairs.

The thing was, Lily couldn’t even work up the energy to be mad, she was that excited.

 

Before Apparating to Diagon Alley, Lily checked the wards she had put up during spring holidays and enhanced at the beginning of the summer. While the Ministry had printed guidelines for wizarding households, she had put a great deal of original thought and, more importantly, research into the design. There were two anti-Apparation wards. The first was weaker, but extended out about half a mile (in every direction, except where it bumped into the wards on the Snape house). It could be breached by a concerted effort, but Lily could also lift it for herself or someone like Mary without completely unraveling the entire design. The second one was much stronger, and only extended out about five houses. Even Lily couldn’t make it through that one without splinching.

The next layer was an alarm. If someone performed magic within fifty meters of Lily’s house, she wore a bracelet that would turn warm. If that person was actively using magic to dismantle another ward, it would become scalding. 

The last layer of wards was more aggressive, but it had to be centered on the lot itself so that a random stranger didn’t accidentally trigger them. Most of the spells that Lily had studied gained strength over time, and unfortunately Lily’s didn’t have the advantage of centuries to concentrate themselves. She had to rely, then, on more mischievous means. None of it was the kind of Dark Magic that you might see on a pureblood ancestral seat, but it would certainly stop anyone but the most determined attacker. And Lily told herself that, if someone was that dead set on attacking her family, the wards before that would hold them off until she could get there.

Mary called her paranoid. Lily called it prepared. She walked the half a mile so that she could close the outer Apparation ward. 

While she still wasn’t used to the sensation of Apparation, it was much better than asking her parents--or God forbid, her sister--for a ride to London. Her dad had promised to teach her how to drive this summer, but she had been home for just over a month now with only three lessons. It didn’t matter, though. Apparation was so much quicker. Learning to drive was more for her father’s sense of normalcy than her convenience. 

Since she had some time to spare, Lily combed through the spines at Flourish’s. All of the textbooks for the year seemed pretty standard, but what she was really drawn to were the neglected books in the back, not the bestsellers on the front tables. Biographies of mostly-forgotten witches, outdated potions books that warned of potential explosions, and poetry that was so bad, no one bothered to send it back to the publishers. She remembered getting lost back here with Severus one summer, laughing at the various titles. They had been so engrossed in their search that they had almost been locked in the store after closing. These days, Lily honestly could say that she didn’t miss Severus anymore, but she did miss having a friend like him. She loved Mary, didn’t know how she would have survived the past two years without her, but their friendship was completely different.

Lily was busy reading the first few pages of a book claiming to unlock the secrets of ancient wand cores when Mary snuck up on her. “Come on, Head Girl, let’s get our books, and then you owe me some ice cream.”

“I thought we were going to get lunch first.”

“But then how will we have enough room for dessert?” Mary teased, her brown curls falling in front of her blue-grey eyes.

Most of the time they spent shopping was spent with Mary complaining about her family and Lily doing a poor impression of her sister and Vernon. When they were settled into a table at Fortescue's, however, the topic turned to Hogwarts gossip.

Mary slouched back in her chair. “I mean, we both knew that you were going to get it, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Lily agreed, though her stomach this morning would have told her something else.

“But still. If I had one wish, I would have begged to see Meadowes’ face when she realized she lost.” 

“Well, it’s not really a competition,” Lily demured, and they then both dissolved into giggles and snickers. Dorcas Meadowes had spent the last six years making it very clear that the two of them were never going to amount to anything, and any time that Lily performed better on a test than her, she nearly threw a tantrum.

“You are too nice. She’s a--” Mary looked at the family of children sitting at the table next to them-- “ _ witch _ who needs to be taken down about thirty rungs. I just hope that, for everyone’s sake but especially yours, that her boyfriend isn’t Head Boy.”

Lily nearly swallowed her ice cream down the wrong pipe. As she coughed, she said, “Oh, no. I haven’t even thought of who is going to be Head Boy.”

“Really? Because that’s all I thought of all morning.” Mary put her ice cream back on the table and twirled her spoon between her fingers.

“All right, let’s hear the theories, then.” Lily couldn’t quite act nonchalant, but she tried to by leaning back in her chair.

“Well, Snape and Rosier have to be out, right? Because they’re both practically Death Eaters. I mean, Dumbledore can be baffling, but he’s not stupid.”

“He could have wanted to balance out the roles?” 

“There’s balance, and then there’s cancelling out the political statement he made by picking a Muggleborn.”

“Alright then, it’s not a Slytherin. What about Tilden?”

Mary sighed. “If they could drag him out of the greenhouses, maybe. Though maybe if Daisy becomes a prefect, he’ll care more.”

“Daisy Hookum? Fifth year Daisy Hookum? Really?”

“Mhm.”

“Interesting. Does she even know he exists?”

“Nope,” Mary said, popping the p.

“Huh. Well, fair enough. I suppose it’s going to be Kenny, and I’m going to die of boredom as he reads the rulebook out loud.”

“What, you’re not going to even to consider your own housemates?” Mary said with mock horror, including one hand on her chest and the other over her forehead.

“I think we can agree that Dumbledore’s experiment to tame the so-called ‘Marauders’ through the sheer force of responsibility has failed,” Lily said, taking another spoonful of her ice cream. Severus’s theories about Remus also floated in the back of her mind, but she pushed those away. It wasn’t her secret to speculate about.

Mary shrugged. “You know, Potter has gotten better, though, considering where he was this time two years ago. Some might say he’s even matured.”

Lily snorted. “I will believe that when he goes an entire month without a detention,” Lily said.

“Speak of the boy, and he will appear,” Mary said, pointing discreetly over Lily’s shoulder.

Lily turned around without thinking. And there they were, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, Remus Lupin, and, naturally rounding out their number, James Potter. She tried to turn back before they noticed her looking, but it was too late. Black had already caught her looking. A broad smile stretched across his face.

“James!” He shouted, even though the Chaser was less than a foot away. “It’s Evans! Let’s go say to Evans!”

“Great idea!” James shouted with just as much volume and more sincere enthusiasm.

Lily groaned and put her head down on the table. “Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to Spotify, I first made the playlist for this fic in 2015, but I remember having the basic plot sketched out when I was in college? At some point, you just have to point the thing. Expect me to attempt to post regularly but sometimes fail.
> 
> Unofficial songs of the chapter: "Shake It Off" by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, "These Heaux" by Bhad Bhabie, and "Perfect Day" by whoever because I am too lazy to look it up.  
> Clearly, you should leave your own suggestions for songs for this chapter below because clearly my taste is trash and so I need guidance.


End file.
